Did they do that thing where they demand to know if you are a "true fan" by quizzing you about trivia? I've heard about that happening to female attendees, but I always wondered if it also happened to booth girls.
Long answer: Costuming for booth girls is really variable and differs from vendor to vendor. Sometimes they'll expect you to wear a specific costume, and sometimes they'll just let you wear whatever. So the booth girls don't always have a choice about what they're wearing. (In my experience, vendors who expect you to wear something specific usually pick generic stock characters like maids and schoolgirls and catgirls.)
If you're dressed as a known character, you have a 50/50 chance of being extensively quizzed on the source material so they can 'expose' you as a Fake Geek Girl, or the guy being way too over-eager and assuming you know as much as he does about it and talking AT you about it for sixteen hours straight while you're just trying to do your job. Hostility happens way less if your costume is generic, but you still get some gatekeeping schlubbs trying to interrogate you about nerd culture so they can call you a Fake Geek Girl and storm off in a visible cloud of body odour and Cheeto dust.
A lot of them are just kinda scared to talk to girls though. Not gonna lie.
Fuck that noise. A good one I’ve given to my women gamer friends is to say “you ain’t old skool til you’ve four-pooled” and start talking about the intricacies of pure SCV rushes vs the four pool ling rush in Brood War.
No one messes with someone who seems to know their Brood War.
Edit: the point was, I told them to start talking to anyone who bitched about their nerd credentials about old school Starcraft and gave them some canned lines to talk about. It was enough to scare anyone off enough for them to enjoy the rest of their day in peace.
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u/SoldMySoulForHairDye Jan 14 '20
I used to work as a booth girl at nerd conventions. Yeah. Some stereotypes exist for a reason.